newton's laws of motion
by a theoretical revolution
Summary: our lives are governed by fragile physics. -amaimon/shiemi


a/n: hyped up on caffeine right now and i don't even know what i'm writing but i hope it's good.

newton's three laws taken from wikipedia. -_-

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((newton's laws of motion))

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i. an object at rest will stay at rest, an object in motion will stay in motion - unless acted upon by an external force

* * *

She smiles at him and gently, lovingly, smooths down the patches of coal-black dirt, speckled with pebbles and bits of gravel that she picks out meticulously and carefully, clasping them between her fingertips as she drops them into a clay bowl where they clatter like coins as they land. Soon, her jar is full.

He offers to help her carry it inside, but she declines with a shake of her head and an assurance that she's fine, that she can handle it herself. She pulls herself up with ease, taking soft, shuffling steps back into the shop, her flowered kimono flowing around her legs. As she walks, the garden's earth familiars scramble out of their hiding places, gathering around her feet and chirping and whistling and squeaking, happy that she's with them. She looks upon them with kindness in her gaze, takes him to hold each of them in her soft palms, admiring the way they have been fashioned from grasses and flowers and moss and dirt. The jar of stones lies, untouched, on a cobblestone.

He feels like his chance has slipped away again. Embarrassed, his tail swishes between his legs, he unwraps another lollipop and gnaws on the acid-green candy, but she turns back and beckons him over. He walks with a stumbling, awkward gait, but she's still grinning widely and she holds out her hands for him to see.

"Look at him," she cooes, marveling at a tiny little greenman with pebble-eyes and twigs woven into its head that stick out like horns. It is a clumsy thing, a newborn in human terms, tottering around the curves and creases in her skin and falling over more times than he can count. But she seems fixated on it, encouraging its progress even as it fails again and again to walk a straight line. He asks why she keeps trying.

"We've all got to try, don't we?" she responds easily, surely. "The vegetables won't grow well if we don't nurture them. The flowers won't bloom if they don't get water and if the sun doesn't shine. We all take care of each other, and they take care of us. Everything's locked in stasis until someone decides to push."

He nods, sticks out a finger and a black nail and watches the greenman instantly gravitate towards him, instinctively feeling the tug of another earth demon.

"So precious," she murmurs.

It clings onto his finger even as he pulls his hand back, holding onto him with a stubborness that is both exasperating and endearing. She chuckles and slides the little greenman from his grasp, sets it down, and watches it tromp away with the others of its kind.

He watches his children leave and feels lonely; winter comes too soon and the plants are never quite ready.

* * *

ii. how fast an object moves is proportional to, and in the same direction as, the force acting upon it, and inversely proportional to its mass

* * *

His heart is a heavy thing; it hangs from his chest, tied with chains and bolts and padlocks, enshrined in a metal coffin. Sometimes, he feels numb all over, a pins-and-needles sensation that permeates his vessel and makes him shiver even through his warm brown trench coat, even under cotton blankets staring out at spring sunshine through his big brother's office windows and looking down at the vegetation below, fluorishing, awakening.

"This thing's dying," he remarks, running his fingers across the dry leaves of a potted plant. The plant is encased in a grotesque pottery piece with crudely formed goblin heads; the soil is dry, the leaves withered and a sickly shade of green. They haven't been watered in a month.

"Haven't had time to get around to it," big brother answers, jotting down something on his endless piles of paperwork. "Running a school is a tough job, you know."

With a single command, the plant _lives_ again, brightening into more vivid emerald hues, the leaves moist and rich with life. With another, it mutates rapidly, spilling over the edges in an assortment of vines and redolent flowers stained white-red and brilliant pinks and blues, crawling over his big brother's fancy carpets and mahogany tables like the tendrils of some hungry monster.

Mephisto looks up over his desk and gives an annoyed sigh. "_Amaimon_," he reprimands, forcefully. "Please do stop."

"You're no fun," he says, but he waves a hand and the vines withdraw, sucked back into nothing in a matter of seconds, while the plant still retains its shape, glossy and green. Matter is neither created or destroyed, only tucked away to be used for later. Perhaps not even that explanation proposed by the scientifically-minded exorcists is enough to cover what he does; his powers violate the laws of physics and it makes him happy, once in a while, before the numbness sets in and he sets to mindlessly downing all the custard-filled pastries he can get and as many cups of hot chocolate as his vessel's stomach will allow.

"What do you plan on doing while you're here?" Mephisto asks, curiously gazing above the towering stacks of white, pausing for a moment with his ballpoint pen suspended. He gives a lifeless shrug of his shoulders in response, radiating indifference.

"I thought I'd visit you, and younger brother. Maybe see Japan. Enjoy my stay."

"Don't get into trouble," big brother warns. "It's putting me at enough of a stretch just to let you in. And if they knew-"

"They know _you're_ a demon, too."

Mephisto throws up his hands. "Of course they do. I'm a good guy."

"Haha."

"What're you laughing at?" Big brother scowls, then goes back to papers and inkpens and stained gloves. "Well, whatever you do, just try to curb your inhibitions. Control yourself, or I'll have to send you back. Don't get up to any crazy business like you did last time."

"I'll just bypass your wards again; these things are child's play. And," he retorts, "it was just _one _night and a few drugs. I had the issue resolved by the next morning."

Big brother says nothing, only scribbles notes and takes occasional sips from a teacup full of lukewarm Darjeeling. He sighs, slouches, stares at the sun 'til his eyes hurt.

::

"Let's go."

He takes her by the hand, so quickly that she doesn't even have time to blink before they disappear and reappear on top of the roller coaster. She gives a little gasp, clutches her chest like she'll faint and fall down.

"Are you alright?" he inquires with some trepidation. He has to remember that she's fragile, after all, that she'll break like glass if he reaches too high of a note.

(and how delicate, like a flower; her hands could be lilies of the valley, white roses, they are so rare)

"I'm fine," she responds, the corners of her mouth curving upwards. Her familiar, Nii, gives a little chirrup of joy, sitting atop her blonde head. "Are we... are we going down this?"

"If you'd like." He shrugs, inside he is tipping like a ship on a stormy sea. "I mean, this isn't a formal date and all, but it's an amusement park. And my brother owns it. Nice, isn't it? We get a free pass to everything here."

To emphasize his point, he waves a black-clawed hand at the vast expanses of attractions left to be ridden and explored, at the empty food vendors that are secretly populated by spirits and afrits and other snickering, giggly creatures he could make visible if she desires. She hugs his arm like the greenman did and shifts her gaze to the roller coaster carts.

"Um, I..." She gulps. "Perhaps the roller coaster first, then?"

He picks her up, bridal-style, tuning out her mortified squeals of indignation, and they both set themselves down in the vaguely centipede-shaped trains; or rather, she does. He stands on the edge, defying gravity and the confines of the physical world, and he snaps his fingers. Instantly, the previously dead coaster powers to life.

"Are you sure about this?" she calls over the din of whirring gears and engines the photograph flashes of dozens of lights, over the groan of the hinges as their cart slides down and begins to accelerate (he used minimal force, so they'll go faster and he'll have more time to enjoy the fall).

"I'm positive," he replies, and then they are perched on the coaster's first big pill, that precipice on which they stand poised, breaths held (she clutches onto the handrails for dear life), and then they experience that stomach-churning plummet downwards.

It's as easy as surfing; his body adjusts to the change, orients himself in relation to the cart. Shiemi screams, part fear and part excitement, as they go up and down, execute crazy loops that only big brother would think to invent and create with such flawless precision, and waggle their tongues laughingly for physics to follow.

Yes, it's just a boy, a girl, and a roller coaster. It accelerates when he wants it do, it decelerates when he wishes it. Physical objects are like violins; you must play them the right way, hit the right notes to produce that pure adrenaline thrill of battles and love and death, you must play it perfectly. He plays it perfectly for her, now; she holds her hands in the air and turns her eyes skyward and winces at the sunlight and cries tears of joy.

It's too short for one accustomed to millennia and aeons, too fast for a being who views years as seconds, but it's a single, pleasurable moment that makes his nerves tingle with a nice buzz and he kisses her afterwards, tastes her flower lips and wraps her arms around her back, watches her respond to the way his lips fit around hers.

Time slows just a bit because he wants it to, and it's still not enough and it's everything he could have wanted at the same time.

(she leaves with a blush on both cheeks and a sway to her step and he tosses his lollipops away because they aren't as sweet as she is)

* * *

iii. when one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body

* * *

Fingers trace patterns in the sky; the earth bellows, roars a guttural belch of sound, sends its roots and mountains surging up to the surface at his beck and call. Everything is supercharged with this static electricity, every heightened sense brought to painfully acute awareness, every motion is delayed a hundredfold.

Younger brother leaps at him, howling in rage and offense, howling like a petulant brat. Stupid child. He swats him away with a flick of his fingers, sends him crashing back down into the ground. Roots and clusters of trees conform to the swell of his power, guided by his direction. They bind themselves around younger brother, wreath him in the chokehold embrace of the earth, his domain. A root tightens itself to agonizing degrees around Okumura Rin's neck, but his brother still screams and tries to fight back. Their father's flames burn bright cerulean and his handiwork disintegrates, bathed in Satan's all-consuming fire.

He feels bitter, envious, watching those flickering blue tongues splay across their battlefield, his younger brother practically bathed in the substance. Call it pride, call it something else; he wants those flames, he wants Father's favor- and younger brother is turning out to be a bigger problem than he initially thought, a sizeable threat. This is a strange experience, but not entirely unfamiliar. Casually, he digs through the treasure chest of his memories and searches until he can find the right word; dust-covered and draped in cobwebs as it is, it will still suffice.

_Fear_. And anticipation. Things he's been so emotionally dead to for what seems like vast millennia of his existence, but now he holds them in his gloved fingers and shivers, feels the touch of winter on a tree, feels autumn creeping up and the inevitable corrosion of all things.

Rebirth, though; this is what keeps him anchored to the planet, what ties him down. Yes, rebirth, all the plants die and then they are reborn, so it is only logical to conclude that he should do the same, no?

His blood burns hot, younger brother is his only focus as he nimbly dodges violent swordstrokes that actually make the air howl whenever they swoop past him, they make the air scream like a thousand voices because satan's flames are gathered around younger brother's katana and they are so powerful that even the intagible things cry out because for a short while, they come alive to feel the pain, the glorious exultation of something that was once light turned to dark.

Younger brother is like a rabid wolf; he foams at the mouth, he snarls incoherently, he lashes at him with a grace actually improved by the jerky, wild movements of his arms. Thrusting his hand out, he grabs Rin's tail, swings him around in a circle, and then tosses him back down where he smashes into the cold, packed ground with a sound that appears to be ribs splintering.

"You really should keep your tail covered," he murmurs, an afterthought remark.

Suddenly, abruptly, younger brother blazes, roars like an inferno, comes flying (_soaring_) back up, teeth bared, the demon sword slashing in a diagonal arc. He smirks, reaches out to deflect the attack-

-when instead of what he has carefully calculated, instead of a cutting motion, he is assaulted by a spontaneous onslaught of the blue fire. His skin hisses as the flames touch, but they do not burn; even through this vessel, his demonic power cannot be contained by a human shell, it buzzes around him and dampens the full force of the blow but damn, it still hurts. He jerks his hands away, biting down on his tongue and examining his raw, blistered palms with narrowed eyes.

Impossible. He planned, he was ready. Younger brother has no surprises because _he_ has lived long enough to see all the surprises man has in store for his kind, and despite his supernatural heritage, it must also be put into consideration that Okumura Rin is a halfling, a human and a demon child.

An impossibility, an anomaly, a flaw in his perfect equation. He snaps his fingers, boulders fly freely and towards Rin, smashing into him like five buses operating at fifty miles per hour. The rubble clears and younger brother is still alive, still radiates life, still fights.

Below him, he spies Shiemi, spread-eagled by the flickering campfire, staring vacantly up at the stars. Her head twists and she's gazing at them, mouth open, the light illuminating her pupils, dilated with terror as she watches the fight play out like some sordid version of Romeo and Juliet.

Screams. Younger brother lunges, dashes through empty space, seems to be running a marathon across the sky. He throws out his palms and sends out all the force he can. Younger brother flies back, doubles around, and launches at him like a human rocketboy. They smash into each other in a tangle of gangly limbs, and younger brother sinks his teeth into his neck like a vampire and he grabs him by the nape of the neck and tosses him away with such force that the sleeve of his coat shreds into pieces.

"Die," he hears himself hiss, and he lets his power flow through the invisible conduits buried in the dirt, where they all lead, irrevocably and inevitably, to himself. The earth gives him strength, he is the chthonian aspect and he is the tree of knowledge and he can sense millions upon millions of lifeforms teeming underneath; his brood, his kin. The earth queaks and trembles upon its axis, the stars shake where they have been hung in space. Leaves wither and fade away into dust. The trees turn brittle and collapse with so much as a passing breeze. He draws power into his core, into the apex of his being, and prepares to launch it.

But he never gets to. Okumura Rin's slash finally lands, connects solidly with his chest and sets him on fire. He screams, a breathless falsetto thing, he thrashes in the conflagration and goes sprawling into a tree; only then do the flames extinguish as he desperately drinks the energy into his being.

Younger brother is baring down on him like a bear on a fish. He breathes hard, waits for a collision that never arrives. In its place, space is rapidly sucked into a gaping darkness more absolute than anything else the physical world could conceive, could imagine, a void of a place that only exists in storybooks and in the darkest depths of the universe where not even Lucifer would dare tread. Older brother is in his peripheral vision, waving his cane around in circles like a loony old wizard. Matter bursts out from where it's been hiding all this time, expands in time to every uttered syllable with a breathy whisper and an intake of air. The white-black walls close around his burnt, smoking form and the last thing he sees is Shiemi looking through the portal and nursing Rin on her lap and the last thing that he registers is ash everywhere and acid in his throat.

::

"That was a major fuck-up, if I ever did see one," comments Mephisto when he awakes into painful, hangover-headache consciousness, his skin throbbing with bee stings and needle pinpricks. Blearily, he reaches for his constant stash of candy because it's what he always washes down the pain with, but he finds that his lollies aren't where they are. His fingers grasp at empty pockets.

That's right. He threw them away, his only painkillers in the world (his second painkillers). Shit. He's stupid, he curses himself out mentally for fucking up one step further.

A tray carrying a cup of thick black coffee and a slightly pasty-looking ichigo daifuku sit before him. He can hear Mephisto's scribbling and knows he's at work again, drafting things, amending things, persuading hundreds with only words on a page. That's always been his brother's forte. He can't handle the fine details of subtle manipulation, or, in Mephisto's case, blatant flattery. Grandiloquence comes to Mephistopheles as easily as the earth responds to his touch. Such is the way of things.

He raises the cup to his lips and tucks his legs into a lotus position, sitting on his brother's rug. The coffee tastes bitter at first, but its fortified with a healthy dose of cream and a faint aftertaste of sugar, so it's not quite as bad. The burns are still there, though; not even who-knows-how-much-time in his brother's rehabilitation chambers, his cuckoo-clock shaped pocket worlds, can fully heal burns inflicted by the demon sword- or, in general, burns inflicted by the blue flames. They are the most corrosive, destructive substance he has ever encountered; even now, he recalls the searing sensation of a thousand torches held to his flesh.

Involuntarily, he shudders.

"How long was I out?" he asks.

Without looking up, older brother answers, "A day and a half. It's afternoon now."

He sees that it's true. The windows let in warm, lazy-looking light that spills across the hardwood floors.

"What are you doing?"

"Covering for your lousy bum." Scribble, scribble, scribble. "You caused a commotion. I deliberately warned you about causing a commotion." Older brother sighs, the bags under his eyes more pronounced than ever. "It was a hell of a job maintaining the spatial barriers to keep Okumura-kun out, and even harder than that to maintain the correct configuration to allow your body to recharge. Praise the lord," he says, a witty smile crossing his face, "that the group you attacked haven't decided to testify against you to the Grigori. You'd be in for it if they did. Earth King Amaimon, spotted on the premises, and attacking _students_, of all things..."

A grin. "Such a scandal that would cause."

"Don't you like those kinds of things?"

"Hell, no. Every incident means more paperwork for me to fill out, and, as it is," he gestures forlornly at the still-towering stacks, "I am busy enough. Save the controversies for later; at least let me have my lunch first."

Absently, he devours the daifuku (it's okay, but it's not very good) and looks out through the glass windows, at the hedge mazes and the gardens and the students milling about. Forming his index fingers and thumbs into circles, he peers out through a pair of invisible, nonexistent binoculars and tries to find something.

"Do those things actually work?" Mephisto asks, a small amount of curiosity creeping into his voice.

He removes his hands.

"No," he replies. "I couldn't find it."

::

His steps lead him to a worn oak door with a knocker. Her house.

She's instead, still resting from her ordeal. The heavy smells of incense and burning herbs permeates his olfactory senses, so many dried plants and medicines neatly filed away in drawers. A set of scales. Green tea burbling in a clay pot. Teacups and half-eaten tea cakes.

His hand strays towards the knocker, which feels new, has that shininess to it that betrays its youth. Closing his eyes and allowing himself to _see_ through his otherworldly perception, he observes sigils and wards carved into the wood, old designs in swirling curliques and elaborate _kanji _characters coupled with the traditional magic circles and pentagrams, but these are not for summoning but for calling away. Protective spells, guarding enchantments alligned with a brighter faction. His fingernails scritchscratch across the blessed gates, the spikes that are tipped with keep-out charms and defensive incantations.

The knocker knocks once, twice. Sleepy footsteps shuffle.

He's all too aware of who he is, _what _he is in this fragile silence with only the birds chirping and the stirring of the land beneath him. Awkwardly, he shifts from one foot to the next, clutching a bouquet of assorted flowers and a red lollipop. She said she liked cherries.

"Coming!" a female voice calls (not her), and he ponders whether to leave or to stay, to flee while he has the chance or stare face-to-face with the horrified mother and try to explain that no, he wasn't trying to kill anyone, he just wanted what he thought was his and this is all a mistake and he's still standing as the door creaks open an inch.

It jams, the hinges are old, the woman mutters. Fight-or-flight.

When it finally swings inside and the matron steps out onto the steps, she looks around, puzzled, until she averts her gaze downward and finds still-fresh roses and lilacs and violets and daisies that must have been picked only minutes ago (how else could they be this lively?) and nothing else.

She sniffs, wrinkles her nose in curiosity. The smells of soil are more pungent than ever; they seem to be concentrated around two spots that would be the perfect size for a pair of medium-length feet.

* * *

iv. there is no fourth rule, but let us pretend that we understand the mechanics of gravity, just this once

* * *

Always, they pull together. She tugs at him like a magnet from miles away, an itch he cannot scratch.

His new vessel is unshapely, hastily formed out of spare materials in a desperate situation. His mind is as keen as ever, impervious to the mental drag normally felt by the lower demons inhabiting a less intelligent lifeform than they are accustomed to. He's old, but he can still adapt. He's a dog who keeps learning tricks again and again and again, but he never manages to outpace her.

This time, maybe.

She sits hunched over a desk, furiously re-copying notes written in a sharp, business-like hand that is not her own; her words are more flowing, water and rivers and the slender curve of flower's stem. Dressed in the True Cross essentials, white shirt and tie and skirt and all, she doesn't notice him until she taps on her window.

She looks up, confused at first, but then a smile breaks through like the sun through the clouds and there, in that pause and for the infinities ahead, he would pay anything to see that smile one more time.

Unlatching the window, she opens her hands. He scurries in, burying her nose in the skin of her palms, squeaking. She laughs and brushes his green fur, paying special attention not to harm the green spike on his head.

"How curious you are, little hamster," she says, and giggles.

Yes, they always pull together. Always.

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a/n: reviews are sunshine and happiness! :) also, please don't favorite without reviewing; thanks.


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